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"Funny and Tender and Not a Desperate Woman:" Sylvia Plath's the Bell Jar, Betty Friedan's the Feminine Mystique, and Therapeutic

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Plath Profiles 287 "Funny and Tender and Not a Desperate Woman:" Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, and Therapeutic Laughter Andrea Krafft Fifty years after their initial publications in 1963 by two graduates of Smith College, both Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique continue to speak to young women who strain against domestic pressures. Numerous scholars, such as Elaine Connell, Jo Gill, and Laurie F. Leach have observed commonalities between Plath and Friedan, frequently noting how the protagonist of The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, struggles to understand her place in a world defined by motherhood and media images of passive femininity. The fact that Plath modeled her protagonist after her own experiences as a Mademoiselle guest editor during the summer of 1953 demonstrates her deep investment in interrogating how postwar popular culture defined womanhood.1 While many critics have linked Plath to the broad crisis affecting American women during the 1950s, they frequently tend to frame her writing within a discourse of rage rather than considering the humor that characterizes much of The Bell Jar. This downplaying of humor may stem from a justifiable desire to present her work as serious in light of critics such as Harold Bloom, who proclaimed that Plath's skills as a writer are "grossly exaggerated" (1).2 Now that Plath's place within the literary canon is well-established, we can reconsider how humor is central to her artistic project, as she wrote in her journals that "I want to write funny and tender women's storys," in order to avoid becoming "a desperate woman, like mother" (412). Some feminist critics accuse domestic comediennes of insensitivity, arguing that their humor betrays its intended audience by presenting women's problems as petty or easily solved. Betty Friedan in particular attacks the group that she labels "Housewife Writers," claiming that their humor does not provide its audience with the promised escape from "their frustrated abilities and their limited lives" (57). Her complaint is that writers such as Shirley Jackson, 1 Garry Leonard discusses this issue more thoroughly in "'The Woman is Perfected. Her Dead Body Wears the Smile of Accomplishment': Sylvia Plath and Mademoiselle Magazine" (1992. Rpt. In McCann 305-337). 2 Regina Barreca notes a similar tendency among early feminist theorists to avoid discussing humor because of a fear that "conservative critics . found feminist theory comic in and of itself" (4). Krafft 288 Phyllis McGinley, and Jean Kerr find professional satisfaction in the activity of writing, but "the joke is not on them," but rather comes at the expense of readers who remain ensconced in domestic spaces (Friedan 57). However, Plath's combined emphasis on humor and tenderness indicates her understanding that her comedy must not grate against her readers, but instead work to unite them in a common affective bond that will help to undercut the feminine mystique.3 In this respect, we can consider Plath in light of Nancy Walker's defense of women's humor, as she claims that comedy offers "one of the few available senses of community among women" ("Solidarity" 78). The female community that emerges in and around The Bell Jar works to counteract the pressures that, according to Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, present women with false choices and threaten to paralyze them. Humor and laughter in this novel provide a potential way to deal with the cultural constraints on American womanhood, offering a solution to the psychological problems that stem from domestic containment. Unnamed Problems: The Effects of Cultural Constraints on 1950s American Women Prior to understanding how humor can function as a unifying force within The Bell Jar, we should consider how the feminine mystique effectively divides the female community between those individuals who embrace the vision of the domestic goddess and resistant women (such as Esther Greenwood) who view housewifery as something that looms threateningly on the horizon. As Friedan defines it, the United States in the fifteen years following the Second World War cultivated an image of the ideal woman as someone who "was healthy, beautiful, educated, [and] concerned only about her husband, her children, [and] her home" (18). Yet, Esther is unable to "find her place in a society with expectations of 'femininity' with which she cannot identify," as she repeatedly feels isolated from women around her who represent satisfied wives and mothers (Pinke 4). For example, sitting in a gynecologist's office, Esther notices a mother and child, jealously observing that "the baby's mother smiled and smiled, holding that baby as if it were the first wonder of the world" (The Bell Jar 222). In this moment, Esther believes that she is in some way deficient, as she feels "unmaternal and apart" in comparison with the serene mother (222). Esther frequently toys with the possibility of joining the maternal secret circle in order to feel more included, as she fantasizes about a potential future in which she might get married and have 3 For further discussion of the female community that emerges from Plath's writing see Janet Badia's Sylvia Plath and the Mythology of Women Readers (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). Plath Profiles 289 "a parcel of kids" (150). The power of the feminine mystique at this moment lies in the fact that it makes childbearing and housekeeping seem like the norm, positioned against the uncertainty that comes with the vast terrain of "other goals and purposes in life" (Friedan 183). Esther Greenwood's growing dissatisfaction and sense of isolation from those women who happily immerse themselves into the roles of wife and mother recalls "the problem that has no name," a psychological condition that Friedan lays out in the first chapter of The Feminine Mystique (Friedan 19).4 The exact nature of this problem is difficult to define, but Friedan describes it as "a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction" that "each suburban wife struggled with . alone" (15). Because they believed that other women were happy and settled in their domestic roles, these suffering women perceived their frustration as a unique problem, even though numerous women attested to feeling a "terrible tiredness" (Friedan 31). Esther likewise notices that some of her fellow guest editors "looked awfully bored," suggesting that they might all be manifesting symptoms of the same cultural condition that shapes young women (Plath 4). Despite this brief moment of recognition, Esther still feels alone in her suffering because both her psychoanalyst and her mother "made it sound as if nothing was really wrong, I only thought it was wrong" (The Bell Jar 130). Isolation thus marks much of the beginning of the novel, as Mrs. Greenwood insists that her daughter can simply decide "to be all right again," suggesting that she is unusual despite the fact that her problem is a common one (146). The paradox at the heart of both The Feminine Mystique and The Bell Jar is that the woman who appears to be "all right" actually consigns herself to an unhealthy life, a catch-22 that clearly emerges in Plath's images of enclosure. Naturally, the central image of Esther "sitting under the same glass bell jar" encapsulates her feelings of immobility (185). Esther similarly compares her personal condition to being "stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out," suggesting her hopeless confinement in a world without movement or change (129). Her inability to change or move forward becomes most evident in the oft-discussed fig tree scene, in which Esther envisions her life as a green fig tree in which "from the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked" (77). Confronted with what Nora Sellei calls the "pressure of choice," she is unable to pick any of these futures, and Esther imagines herself "starving to death" (347; The Bell Jar 77). In some ways, her 4 While Elaine Connell notes that "Plath's Bell Jar reads like an individual's experience of this problem," she does not examine the novel's connection with Friedan in any extended fashion (54). Krafft 290 indecisiveness echoes Friedan's sentiment that women should not have to limit themselves to "a half-life, instead of a share in the whole of human destiny" (Friedan 67). However, as her potential futures wither around her, Esther's total immobility suggests a more sinister problem: she cannot latch onto a future image of herself. Esther repeatedly notes that she "had nothing to look forward to" and cannot see her life "beyond the nineteenth" year (The Bell Jar 117, 123). Society's preferred future (i.e. marriage) obscures Esther's vision of an alternative life, not only constraining her choices but also affecting her mental health in profoundly damaging ways. While Esther appears unable to choose her future, her subsequent medical institutionalization represents how she and her fellow "broken" women seemingly lose their ability to speak back to a society that silences their unorthodox roles. Esther's neighbor in Caplan (one of the buildings of the mental hospital), Miss Norris, is a prime example of this voicelessness, as she appears literally unable to speak and moves with mechanical awkwardness. Esther notices that "in all my hours of vigil Miss Norris hadn't said a word" and that she "jerked into motion like a doll on wheels," signifying her evacuated willpower (193). Similarly, Doctor Gordon's mental patients look like "shop dummies, painted to resemble people and propped up in attitudes counterfeiting life" (142). Stan Smith describes this scene as "a parody of normality," as the mental patients repetitively imitate reality, thus "isolating and exposing its strangeness" (43).
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